This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 35: Putting sounds into syllables is like putting toppings on a burger. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 35 show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: And I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about syllables! But first, Gretchen’s book is out now. If you haven’t bought it yet, you should buy a copy!

Gretchen: Yes! It’s very exciting to finally have other people being able to read the book and talk to me about memes, and emoji, and punctuation, and all of the internet linguistics things that I’ve been thinking about for three years. We are doing a very special Q&A episode for the book. This episode goes up on August 15th. You have until August 15, so you have some number of hours until it is no longer August 15th in any time zone. You can check ahead to Hawaii and maybe gain a few hours that way to send in your questions about things to do with internet linguistics, the book-writing process – and then we’ll do a very special behind-the-scenes bonus episode about that.

Lauren: I’m looking forward to everyone else’s questions. I have a bunch of questions about how the book-writing process went. I’m looking forward to that Patreon bonus episode. Also on the Patreon we have a new $15+ tier. Several people have been asking for a way to support us even more than the $5 a month for bonus episodes. At our $15 Ling-phabet tier you will receive your very own symbol of the International Phonetic Alphabet, which you can get through either a super scientific quiz or just merely saying that you have a favourite.

Gretchen: Then, we will add your name and symbol of choice to our Lingthusiasm Supporter Wall of Fame on our website. We’re happy to put your name or any other name within reason. If you want to give this as a gift to somebody, that’s also a thing you can do. And if you join this new level before August 15th – this is the same time zone thing that you’re running into right now – you can also get a signed book plate, which is a custom Because Internet sticker that you can stick into your copy of Because Internet, which I will sign for you and I’ll put your name or whatever name you want. You can stick it inside your book and then you have a signed copy of Because Internet. If you join that very soon, you can get that as well.

Lauren: Of course, even if you don’t listen to this episode within the first 24 hours of it going up, you can still buy Gretchen’s book from all good and bad booksellers – preferably good ones. You can also support us on the Patreon.

Gretchen: Yes. There are some other ways to get an actual, physical copy of the book signed, but this is probably the easiest one. Hopefully, you have a chance to do that.

[Music]

Lauren: Gretchen, I am going to test you. Everyone can play along. I’m gonna give you some pairs of words and I want you to tell me whether they sound like English words.

Gretchen: Okay. Sounds good.

Lauren: They’re made up – some of them. The first one is “blick” and “bnick.”

Gretchen: “Blick” sounds like a pretty reasonable English word. I don’t know what it means yet, but it could mean something. “Bnick” – I’m not so sure.

Lauren: I actually even have trouble saying it. I feel like I’m saying “buh-nick” – “buh” … “nick” all at once.

Gretchen: /bnɪk/ – B-N-I-C-K. Not something I’d expect English to turn into a word – no.

Lauren: No. The B and the N together don’t really work that well. What about the word “copter” versus the word “pter”?

Gretchen: Yeah, “copter,” I mean, is an existing English word – could continue to be an existing English word. Seems legit to me. “Pter” – yeah, the P-T thing, again, not really doing it for me.

Lauren: Because that’s the – like when you say “pterodactyl,” I know that it’s P-T, but I can never say that P.

Gretchen: Or like the Greek “Ptolemy” is just /taləmi/. It’s not /ptaləmi/ even though that’s how they said it back in the day.

Lauren: In fact, “helicopter” is from Greek “heliko-pter” – “spinning” and “flying” are the two roots there.

Gretchen: It really seems like it should be from “heli” and “copter,” but it’s “heliko-pter.”

Lauren: Which is not how my English brain can divide that word up.

Gretchen: No. No. It really isn’t. But the Greeks are really happy to have /pt/.

Lauren: Okay. Next two are “fneeze” and “sneeze.”

Gretchen: “Sneeze” seems like it’s doing fine. But with the F – “fneeze”?

Lauren: I’m really glad that you recognized “sneeze” as a word. We’re doing well. Good work.

Gretchen: My vocabulary is really good. I know the words “helicopter” and “sneeze.” Yeah, “fneeze” – also not so much.

Lauren: “Fneeze” was the original way that English speakers said “sneeze.”

Gretchen: That is amazing.

Lauren: Then, when they started printing it, that “F” looked like that long “S” that you get in ye olde printing times.

Gretchen: And people started pronouncing it much more sensibly as “sneeze.” We don’t have any words in English that begin with /fn/.

Lauren: Yeah. We literally had, like, three of them. And two of them are now gone, and people turned “fneeze” into “sneeze” because it felt more like the shape of an English word. Okay. Next one is “sing” versus “ngiss”.

Gretchen: “Sing” – again, an English word. I recognize it. Seems very English-word-like. But “ngiss” – I don’t think we have any English words that begin with /ŋ/.

Lauren: No. But we do in languages like – a lot of Australian languages and also Syuba, the language I work on, has that initial /ŋ/ sound. Even though I know this, I really struggle to pronounce it because it’s not where it goes in English. We have it at the end of a word. I know I can make this sound. But I really struggle to make it at the start of a word.

Gretchen: You have it in Vietnamese at the beginning of words. And Cantonese, I think, sometimes you see it in people’s last names – but not at the beginning of words in English.

Lauren: The final pair is “heat” and “tih.”

Gretchen: “Heat” – also an English word. Seems like it works. “Tih” – with the “H” at the end, I can make it, but it kind of reminds me of when I was studying Arabic and I had to learn how to make words that ended with an “H” sound because that’s not where we’re used to saying it in English. Even if you write an H – like “Ahh!” – you write it with an H, but you don’t say /ahh/ unless you speak Arabic, maybe.

Lauren: H goes at the start of a word for English, /ŋ/ goes at the end of a word, and when you try and put them in the other spot, it’s really hard to say and it’s really hard to hear as well.

Gretchen: That’s something that I find really interesting because when we think of the sounds of a language, it’s easy to be like, “Okay, here’s a list of the sounds in this language,” but it’s not just about which sounds you have, it’s also about how you can combine them with each other – which ones can go at the beginning of the word, which ones can go at the end of the word. Not all languages let you do all possible combinations.

Lauren: That’s because different languages have different structures for their syllables and what sounds can go together in a syllable, which is like a chunk of sounds together.

Gretchen: A word is made up of syllables and that kind of determines what one you can do. If you talk about words that are just one syllable long, that kinda gives you the maximal picture of what sounds can combine in that language.

Lauren: What sounds can combine and what spots they can go in within that structure. In fact, the word “syllable” comes from a Greek word that means “goes together” or “what goes together,” which is a really nice – I kind of like that, that “syllable” means what can hang out together.

Gretchen: That’s very nice. Also, just to clarify, we’re not talking about signed languages here because signed languages don’t have sound-based rules for how they go together because they don’t have sounds.

Lauren: They’re not stuck with this narrow-minded problem of linear time in the way that sounds are when they all have to follow a string.

Gretchen: Sounds only exist in one dimension. Signs exist in two dimensions. They’ve got their own constraints, and we’re just not gonna get into them in this episode. Yeah! Different languages have different shapes for their syllables – different ways they like their syllables to be constructed. I like to think of a syllable as kind of like a burger.

Lauren: Awesome.

Gretchen: It’s a very delicious metaphor. I’m sorry if anyone’s hungry right now. You have your pieces that go together like the patty and the bun, and the various toppings, and cheese and so on that you might add to your burger. There’s various different kinds of ways you can do that when you’re looking at the syllable-burger as a whole.

Lauren: Different languages allow you to put different things in the burger and in different orders.

Gretchen: Yeah, and some people – there was a lot of controversy about the burger emoji a while back because people were annoyed that some versions of it had the cheese below the meat instead of on top of the meat. The order is important when you put things in a burger.

Lauren: And what you include and how much you can include in a burger definitely varies from place to place.

Gretchen: It can be political sometimes. I don’t know what you guys put in burgers in Australia that is different.

Lauren: Well, a classic Australian burger has beetroot in it.

Gretchen: Oh, okay. See, I would definitely not think of beets as a thing you put in burgers.

Lauren: It’s delicious.

Gretchen: It probably is. I’ve never tried it. Languages are also often faced with syllables that they can’t necessarily handle through their own internal resources. They have a couple options. One of those is to say, “Okay, there’s so much here that I’m actually gonna split this across two burgers” and another of which is to say, “Look, there’s so much here. I’m just gonna take some stuff out and completely discard it.” One very salient example to English speakers sometimes is when Spanish borrows a word from English. In English, you can start a syllable with a sequence of sounds like /sp/ or /sk/ or /stɹ/. You can have an S and then a consonant or some consonants after it at the beginning of a syllable in a sequence like “Sprite” or “school” or “scheme” or “street” or in a name like “Stephanie.” But in Spanish, this combination of S and a consonant at the beginning doesn’t work. You can have just S at the beginning, but you can’t have S and then a consonant at the beginning of a syllable. It’s just not something they’re keen on. The way that that they deal with this is they say, “Okay, if you try to put S and then a consonant at the beginning of a syllable, you’re gonna add a vowel in before the S.” Now, the S belongs to the previous syllable and the consonant belongs to the next one. You’ve split them across too different sorts of burgers. You get things like “Stephanie” becomes “Estephanie.” Or “Sprite” becomes “Esprite.” Or “school,” which goes back to the Latin root “schola” becomes in Spanish “escuela” rather than “scuela” or “schola.” In all of these cases, you’re adding the E at the beginning to kind of rescue this S and allow it to stay because otherwise it’s not something that works for speakers of that language to pronounce.

Lauren: Nepali speakers do the same. But instead of E at the start for their burger, they use an /i/ burger. So, it’s “/iskul/” instead of “/ɛskul/.” They don’t like S and K in the same burger, so they move the S over to another little burger with an /i/.

Gretchen: I like to think of the vowel in the middle as the meat or the patty or the portabello mushroom in the middle of the burger. Then, you have your consonants on the other side, which are kind of like the buns. It’s like “No, we’ve got too much bun. This bun is too big. We need to give it its own patty – its own vowel – by adding an extra vowel.“ Another example of this is – so Hawaiian, which is really – the largest syllable that it will let you have is just a consonant and a vowel all by itself. When the expression “Merry Christmas” was borrowed in Hawaiian, it got converted into “Mele Kalikimaka.” “Merry” becomes “mele” because they don’t have an R in Hawaiian. That’s pretty straightforward. And then “Christmas” – so that has a /k/ /ɹ/, /kɹ/, but that’s too much in Hawaiian, so you get “kali” rather than /kɹ/ to break up that sequence as well.

Lauren: Hawaiian is like when you choose to eat lots of individual, tasty, smaller cheeseburgers rather than one big burger full of stuff.

Gretchen: Yeah. It’s kind of like the sliders of syllables. Everything’s just a bunch of small, open-faced sandwiches.

Lauren: I think the important thing here is everyone still gets to eat plenty of burgers.

Gretchen: It’s interesting because there’ve been some studies that show that some languages have syllables that are smaller – that just have maybe, maximum, a consonant and a vowel, or a consonant and a vowel and a consonant and no more. Those languages tend to pronounce their syllables faster because there’s less information in them. Whereas, a language like English, the most dense-syllabled word in English is the word “strengths,” which has got three at the beginning S-T-R, and at the end it’s got /ŋ/ /θ/ /s/. “Strengths” – three at the beginning, three at the end.

Lauren: That is a very large and full hamburger situation.

Gretchen: It’s a very large and dense – there’s a lot of toppings and stuff on this hamburger. So you say those a bit slower because they’ve got more information in them. When you count by syllables, it seems like some languages are faster, but it’s because they’ve got smaller syllables. If you count by bit of information, they actually end up averaging out to about the same.

Lauren: I learnt Polish, which also is a language that allows a lot of stuff in a single syllable burger. But it allows different stuff to English. It took a long time to get my head around that. I know we don’t normally try and apologise for how badly we speak languages on the show but, like, I really do feel it’s been a long time since I’ve worked out my Polish consonant cluster mouth. A word like “wstrząs” which means “shock,” has multiple consonants before that vowel that we don’t normally put together in English.

Gretchen: Yeah. I don’t even think I can produce it – /vəʃɑnt͡s/ – yeah. I’m definitely dropping some of them just to –

Lauren: Just to try and make it fit within the kind of burgers that you’re used to.

Gretchen: One thing I could do if I was trying to say that is /vʃɑnt͡s/ – I’m gonna drop one. Or I could say /və-ʃɑnt͡s/ and try to add a vowel in between to split it up.

Lauren: A bit like Hawaiian speakers do with “Kalikimaka” for “Christmas.”

Gretchen: Exactly – add a vowel there. English speakers, sometimes we drop stuff. Sometimes, we don’t. You can see this in words that we’ve borrowed from other languages. Like with “helicopter,” you don’t need to do that there because it’s in the middle of the word. But in a word like “pterodactyl,” you just drop the P. Or “psychology,” you just drop the P there. Or “xylophone,” which was originally /ksɑɪləfoʊn/ because that’s what sound an X makes.

Lauren: Oh, yeah. I never thought about that. Most of you just get used to saying words how you say them.

Gretchen: Yeah, exactly. In French, for example, they’ve also borrowed these words from Greek, but French is more okay about saying those consonants at the beginning. In French, you say, “la psychologie” and “xyloph” – I don’t know if you do it with “xylophone” – /ksiləføn/. You definitely say /psikələʒi/ in French. You don’t say /sikələʒi/. Sometimes, in English we drop it. And sometimes, in English we add another little vowel to kind of rescue all of the consonants. In words from Russian, some English speakers can say things like “Vlad” and “Ksenia,” but a lot of times you’ll get /vəlæd/ or /kəsɛnjə/ in order to try to keep both of the consonants there.

Lauren: A bit like Spanish speakers and Nepali speakers with /iskul/. We move that initial /v/ in “Vlad” to its own /vəlæd/ syllable.

Gretchen: To try to say the whole thing. Japanese does this as well. In an English loan word like “picnic,” because in Japanese they don’t like consonants at the end of a syllable unless it’s an N or an M, so “picnic” becomes something like “pikuniku” because you wanna rescue those Ks by giving them their own vowel.

Lauren: The start and the end of a syllable have their own characteristics. We’ve been talking around the kind of burger part and what can go before or after the burger. But that can differ. With Japanese, you can only have an M or an N after that central part.

Gretchen: Exactly. I think this is one of the reasons I like a burger metaphor in particular because a sandwich also has a central part with the filling and two pieces of bread, but what makes a burger distinct is that it’s asymmetrical. You’ve got a top of a bun that’s different in shape from the bottom of the bun. Languages often let you do different things with the start of the syllable than they let you do with the end of the syllable. In many cases, at the end of the syllable, you can’t put as many consonants there. Sometimes, you can only put a few, like M and N, or you can’t put any, like in Hawaiian. Or in English, you can put the /ŋ/ at the end of a syllable, but not at the beginning. Or you can put the H – the /h/ – at the beginning of the syllable but not the end.

Lauren: Yeah. We definitely can’t put it at the end as we discovered at the start of this episode.

Gretchen: /ŋah/, / ŋah/, what a great word! “Hang” – totally good word. /ŋah/ – not a word.

Lauren: /ŋah/ for English is the equivalent of serving a burger with the bun upside down. An English speaker would just be like, “What is happening?”

Gretchen: “What have you done?”

Lauren: “What have you done with my burger?”

Gretchen: It doesn’t even sit on the plate. The top is curved, so it doesn’t even sit there. It just kinda falls over.

Lauren: It could be a perfectly good burger in many other languages – a very confusing burger in English.

Gretchen: Right. What you think of as something that belongs on the top, or what you think of as something belongs on the bottom. I think there’s also so room for some individual variation. Do you put the ketchup on the top bun or the bottom bun? I don’t know. In general, languages do have this asymmetric relationship between what can go before and after the vowel.

Lauren: The vowel being that really central – it’s hard to – a burger without the patty in the middle is a salad roll.

Gretchen: Yeah, if you have – I was trying to think about this as well, because you need to stress test your metaphors before you commit to them. I was thinking, back in the day, when I was a student and not very organised, and I was a vegetarian and I was trying to get enough protein, sometimes I would just eat a veggie burger with some carrot sticks or something, or a salad or whatever, because I wouldn’t have the buns. That’s something you can do when you’ve still eaten, by some definition, something of a burger. I think if I just had the bun by itself, I have not eaten a burger.

Lauren: No, you’ve eaten a roll.

Gretchen: You’ve just eaten a roll. You’ve eaten a bun. By no definition is this a burger. Whereas, if you just eat the patty, you have kind of still eaten a burger even though it’s a very small burger.

Lauren: Overwhelmingly, when people talk about syllables, the vowel that’s in the middle is a really central anchor point for almost all languages.

Gretchen: You need this anchor point of something to make the syllable. It’s generally a vowel, but it’s not 100% a vowel because there are some words in English, for example, depending on how you pronounce a word, like “bottle,” you probably say /bat-l̩/ and it’s just really just an L – /l/. You could say /battəl/, which might give you vowel there. You could just say /baʔl̩/ or /baʔn̩/ and that might just be /n/ – the N itself – that’s the second syllable and there’s no vowel to speak of.

Lauren: That N is the portabello mushroom of burgers.

Gretchen: Yeah, exactly. It’s kind of the centre of it, but you don’t normally think of it as a prototypical burger.

Lauren: As a vegetarian, I am really sick of portabello mushrooms as burger. But as a language speaker, I love syllable nasals and syllable Ls.

Gretchen: Well, I also kind of think of – so you have can have in the middle one vowel, but you could also have several vowels. You could have something like “bike” has /ɑɪ/, which is a diphthong, which is kind of two vowels smooshed together. So, maybe that’s kind of like a deconstructed burger – something that’s got multiple pieces inside of it.

Lauren: You can order two patties in a burger if you want a really meaty burger – yeah.

Gretchen: The other reason I really like this burger metaphor is that if that you wanna serve a burger with only one bun, you probably take the top one off because that’s the one that’s the weirder shape, and you can still leave the bottom part of the bun and the patty part on your plate. There’s also kind of a different relationship that this vowel has with the consonant or consonants that come after it versus the ones that come before.

Lauren: It’s a very fancy restaurant that you’re eating in if you have to use cutlery to eat a topless burger.

Gretchen: You can have an open-faced sandwich. People don’t often have an open-foot sandwich. What’s the opposite of an open-faced sandwich, where you only have the top?

Lauren: An “open-bottom sandwich,” which is, I think, why they don’t say it. It sounds ridiculous and it looks ridiculous, and it’s even more ridiculous to eat.

Gretchen: It’s very messy.

Lauren: Although, it totally works fine for syllables. So, we found, finally, the first thing where the metaphor really doesn’t hold.

Gretchen: Yeah, the metaphor doesn’t hold in the sense that you can have a syllable like /ba/, which doesn’t have a bottom thing. But there is this closer relationship that the vowel has with anything that might come after it, because when we talk about what are different kinds of poetic devices you can do with languages or what are interesting kinds of ways you can play around with sounds – so you can have things that rhyme, which means that the vowel and any consonants that come after are the same. Or you can have alliteration, which means that just the initial consonants are the same. You don’t often get something where the first consonants and the vowel are the same, but the latter consonants are different.

Lauren: As a poetic device. Obviously, we can do this, but we’re not as into it.

Gretchen: You have “bad,” “mad,” “sad,” “glad” – these all rhyme. It’s great.

Lauren: Excellent.

Gretchen: Or you can have “bad,” “big,” “Ben,” “brigand,” “boxes” – and all these begin with B. You could make some sort of “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers” sort of thing out of them. But “bad,” “bat,” “bag,” “back,” “ban” –

Lauren: They’re technically more alliterative because they all have B and A. But we don’t necessarily find them any more compelling than anything that was just a B at the start.

Gretchen: Yeah. The extra vowel doesn’t seem to gain us anything, as opposed to “bad,” “mad,” “sad,” “glad,” which is like, “Yeah! This is great! This is really doing something. Now we’re in a Dr. Seuss story.”

Lauren: So satisfying. We’re really into rhyming as a poetic device in contemporary English. But Old English was really into alliteration.

Gretchen: In Old English, it’s all about those initial consonant sounds, and they didn’t really care about the ends. This is a distinction that seems to be relevant in a lot of languages – the rhyming part of the syllable as compared to the onset part, which is just that initial set of consonant or consonants at the beginning.

Lauren: You need to understand how this rhyme part works, not overtly because obviously people can make rhymes without sitting there going, “Hmm, I must make sure that the vowel and the information following it is all the same in order to create a successful rhyme,” but you see even really young kids are great at understanding if something rhymes and also are really good at Pig Latin, which requires you to take the onset – so that top of the burger – off and then put it on the top of another, new syllable burger, which ends in A. I am terrible at Pig Latin.

Gretchen: Oh, I did it a lot as a kid. You have, like, “Pig Latin” becomes “Ig-pay Atin-lay.” That “ig” that’s left over is your rhyme. And then you’ve taken the onset – the P – and put it at the end. So, example, my name “Gretchen” and you put it into Pig Latin, it’s “Etchen-gray” because you’ve taken both the G and the R – because that’s the whole onset – and put it at the end.

Lauren: Having “Retchen-gay” would be very bad Pig – like, I would not be Pig Latin-ing correctly.

Gretchen: Yeah. That’s not how you Pig Latin. People are sensitive to this distinction even though most people don’t know the word “onset” or think about it in those terms. It’s something that is very intuitive from a language game. There’s also Latin games like “Ibbish” or "Obbish” where you put “ib” or “ob” in between the onset and the rhyme. In a word like – oh, I can’t do this one at all. In a word like “pig,” you would “pib-ig” or something like that – or “pob-ig.”

Lauren: This makes me so much happier to know that the kind of on-the-fly processing that you need to do for things like Pig Latin really are learnt behaviours because you can’t just immediately do it with another one.

Gretchen: I can do Pig Latin really fast, and the other ones I didn’t learn as a kid. You’ve gotta make sure that your kids acquire Pig Latin when they’re young enough because otherwise they’ll never get them.

Lauren: I missed the Pig Latin acquisition window, clearly.

Gretchen: I know. It’s terrible. I missed the Ibbish/Obbish acquisition window. This is something that people are really sensitive to. And yet, there’s not alternative version of Pig Latin where it’s like – I don’t even know how you would do it. You’d have to be like…

Lauren: P-A-/gə/.

Gretchen: Well, I’m trying to think – so what if you take the last consonant and you put it at the beginning – “gepi”? “Latin” would become “Naylati.” This is just not a thing that language games do.

Lauren: I never had much luck learning Pig Latin, but understanding how syllables work has made me much more aware of going learning other languages when it comes to – because we focus a lot on learning the sounds of a language, but it’s rare to be explicitly taught how to combine those sounds into syllables.

Gretchen: I think that was something that I noticed when I was learning Arabic that I had to learn how to make this H at the end of the word – when I was learning German – because they have not just /ʃtɹ/ but you can also do something like /ʃm/, which is less common in English except in a few loan words. Another interesting example of this is in Dutch where they have this combination of /s/, which is very straightforward, and /x/, like the German C-H sound – /x/ – but together it’s like /ʃx/ and I just can’t do it. I have tried a lot. There’s a city – and this is a very unique sound combination to Dutch – and there’s this city, which I’m gonna pronounce wrong, but it’s like “Scheveningen” – maybe. This was used as a shibboleth during the second World War to distinguish between whether somebody was Dutch or not. They would try to get them to pronounce this name because it’s really hard if you’re not Dutch.

Lauren: It’s a bit like when I was learning Syuba and other Tibetan languages that have that initial /ŋ/ sound. It was very frustrating to know I can make this sound. I’ve made it in English my whole language-speaking life. But putting it at the start of the word suddenly becomes a challenge for the shape of the mouth.

Gretchen: It’s the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The combination of sounds is an additional thing that can be really interesting about language even apart from the individual sounds that are there.

Lauren: Just like it’s fun to bring people to Australia and introduce them to burgers with beetroot in it, it’s really fun when you learn a new language to figure out what combinations of sounds it allows.

Gretchen: Yeah. Linguists have a lot of fun drawing diagrams to represent the information about – okay, what can go in the onset of this syllable? What can go in the rhyme? How can we divide the rhyme further between the nucleus, which is the vowel, and the coda, which is the consonants that come after? How can we represent this information in a way that makes it easier to talk about the differences and similarities between languages?

Lauren: Of course, diagrams are fun. But hamburgers are more fun.

Gretchen: Maybe linguists should draw their syllable diagrams as if they were actually hamburgers – new proposal.

[Music]

Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm, and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, IPA ties, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I tweet and blog as Superlinguo.

Gretchen: I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter. My blog is AllThingsLingustic.com. My book about internet language is called Because Internet. To listen to bonus episodes and help keep the show ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Recent bonus topics include animals, unique words that you use with your family, and direction words like “right” “left” “north” and “south” in different languages. You can also sign up to the Ling-phabet tier where we will assign you your very own symbol of the International Phonetic Alphabet, based on our super-scientific personality quiz, and add your name and symbol to our Lingthusiasm Supporter Wall of Fame on our website. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life.

Lauren: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our audio producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our editorial manager is Emily Gref, our music is “Ancient Cities” by The Triangles.

Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!

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